The Orb Is Like a Weeble That Sings Hauntingly While Not Falling Down

Emily Velasco is a maker who tends to focus on rather unusual projects. Her builds often feature biological components, trippy analog circuits, and psychedelic sound. For example, she recently 3D-printed a cactus with real human hair used in place of more conventional spines. In another project, she built a synthesizer decorated with an actual raccoon skull. Her newest project can best be described as “Weeble-esque.” The Orb is a beautiful hand-turned wood contraption that emits haunting tones and it tilts and twirls.

If you’re not familiar with Weebles, they were toys originating in the 1970s that would famously wobble but not fall down. They looked a bit like painted eggs, and had a weight at their bottom in order to keep them standing upright. The Orb is weighted in a similar way to help it wobble around wildly without actually falling over onto its top. That’s necessary because the top has a speaker that outputs strange, otherworldly tones. The sound changes as The Orb tilts, which results in a weird — yet fascinating — warbling voice that comes across as quite alien.

That sound is produced by an Arduino Nano board that is running the Mozzi audio synthesis library. It uses the X, Y, and Z outputs from a SparkFun triple-axis accelerometer module as the input for the synthesizer, meaning the notes are controlled by the movement of the device. The electronics are housed within a wood enclosure that was hand-turned on a lathe — a process that Velasco live-streamed from quarantine. The speaker cover is aluminum, and the holes were drilled by hand and then the entire plate was given a nice circular brushed finish. Velasco achieved that by attaching the aluminum plate to a drill and then holding sandpaper to it as it spun. The Weeble-like capabilities were handled with Tungsten weights glued to the bottom of the wood enclosure. The resulting device is fantastically eerie and just as imaginative as Velasco's other projects.